Obsessed

“Redacted,” “Love in the Time of Cholera,” and “Margot at the Wedding.”

Brian De Palma’s new movie looks at a U.S. Army platooon in Iraq.Credit TOM BACHTELL

Everyone complains about media overload, but no one, including me, wants to give up access to magazines, newspapers, TV, blogs, or Web sites—the thousands of sources of urgent or frivolous assertion. We are caught, willy-nilly, between hunger and surfeit, curiosity and dismay. I assume that Brian De Palma’s fascinating but strangely tormented “Redacted” was made in something like this ambivalent mood. It’s based on actual events—the rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl, and the murder of her family, involving five members of a U.S. Army platoon, near Baghdad, in March, 2006. (Four men have been convicted, and one is awaiting trial.) De Palma has made a fiction out of the events, creating characters and situations whose precise nature he inferred from blogs, soldiers’ videos, and news reports. And he has realized his fictional version with fictional visuals: a video diary made by one of the soldiers; a terrorist Web site showing the murder of the platoon’s master sergeant; a portentous French documentary complete with stern Baroque music; and so on. De Palma told a similar story in the 1989 “Casualties of War”—a squad captures, violates, and kills a Vietnamese girl—but in that movie he shaped everything into an uninterrupted flow of emotionally upsetting but physically beautiful narrative. He must now feel that neither a unified Hollywood treatment of such a story nor the aesthetic softening that beauty provides is still possible—that such an experience can’t simply be told but must be jaggedly assembled through clumsy, off-center representation. The movie is a grimly mischievous emblem of our media-blitzed world.

“Redacted” is a low-budget experimental film without stars, although there are remnants of the traditional Second World War platoon movie. The rough vessels of democracy here include a house intellectual, who reads John O’Hara and stays out of trouble; the diarist, who thinks his video will get him into film school; two racist buffoons; and a straight arrow named Lawyer McCoy, who tries to argue them out of what they want to do. The men have some happy moments, but they’re generally in terrible shape—scared, trigger-happy, and quick to launch ritual accusations of faggotry or pussydom at anyone who doesn’t want to do something violent. They don’t know why they are in Iraq; they “do their job” as narrowly defined, which often means doing it blindly, senselessly—shooting at a frightened driver who runs through a checkpoint, for instance. When the sergeant is killed by a bomb, the two thugs, terrified, release their fear by assaulting the most vulnerable and innocent person around, a teen-age girl.

“Redacted” is hell to sit through, but I think De Palma is bravely trying to imagine his way inside an atrocity, and that he’s onto something powerful with his multisided approach. The French documentary frames the events impassively, as timeless tragedies of war. The diarist, in his amiable desire to become a filmmaker, doesn’t realize at first that thrusting a camera between himself and a murder cannot absolve him of complicity in the crime. Finally, the terrorist video is itself an act of violence. In other words, the mock-documentary material moves from observation to complicity to participation. The movie interrogates itself. De Palma is caught in the coils of the problem: how do you register and create outrage at a crime without seeming to capitalize on it?

“Redacted” takes all kinds of risks, and so it’s perhaps not surprising that it has already been charged with fomenting anti-Americanism, or that De Palma himself has been accused of exploitation. But the movie explores an issue that has been debated for years, by Susan Sontag, among others—the morality of visual representations of atrocity—and it comes off as the opposite of exploitation. De Palma exposes no flesh, and illuminates the assault with only a flickering, wavering light; the murders take place off-camera. In all, the assault excites nothing but disgust. None of us particularly want to hear what “Redacted” has to say, including liberals who criticize the war but regard the soldiers as noble victims. De Palma suggests, by contrast, that some soldiers have become demoralized by the incoherent war policy and have fallen into criminal behavior—an unpleasant idea, but hardly, after Abu Ghraib and Haditha, a lie. To transfer the anger engendered by the movie to the moviemaker himself is to allow one’s feelings to blur what’s on the screen.

In “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Mike Newell’s adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s great 1985 novel, Florentino Ariza—a hustling, excitable teen-age boy living in late-nineteenth-century Colombia—catches sight of a pretty rich girl, Fermina Daza, and falls in love with her forever. Some years go by, and they exchange many letters, but Florentino (Javier Bardem) loses Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) to another man, the aristocratic young doctor Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt). Trailing around after her, Florentino languishes in his soul while carrying on innumerable meaningless affairs. We can take it on faith, I guess, that his eternal love is based on that first impression—after all, Dante claimed to be inspired his whole life by a quick look at Beatrice when he was nine and she was eight. Florentino is a bit of a poet, too, and obsession like his, one would think, is its own reward; that is, the benefit of the obsession is precisely the exquisite emotions of longing and suffering. But that’s not García Márquez’s idea. He’s a romantic, not a Freudian; and Florentino is no commonplace neurotic. The book, moving toward its triumphant conclusion, is a wonder. The long, magnificently adorned sentences—a stately river depositing alluvial riches of Colombian culture, décor, sexuality, humor, and manners into the reader’s heart—are as intoxicating a literary experience as any available to us.

Alas, the movie doesn’t have that rich allusiveness or strong dose of foolish passion. It’s a well-crafted, handsome period piece, and pleasant to watch, but the intensity of an obsessional style—something that matches Florentino’s crazy single-mindedness—is beyond Newell’s range. The director of “Donnie Brasco” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral” doesn’t paint with the camera; he doesn’t seize on certain visual motifs, as he should, and turn them into the equivalent of a lover’s devotion to fetishes. He’s a realist handling comically extravagant material, and he does little more than competently frame a mixed set of performances. As the doctor, Benjamin Bratt looks good in a goatee, a high, floating collar, and a black cutaway coat, and Giovanna Mezzogiorno has the reserve needed to make Fermina’s beauty feel inaccessible. Javier Bardem, however, is misdirected. He drags himself about the city with his shoulders sagging. He’s woebegone, and the scenes of women eagerly pulling him into bed are puzzling in the extreme—he’s so stricken that it seems more likely they’d want to take him home and give him hot sopa de pollo instead.

There are many ways of frustrating and boring an audience, but setting up a bunch of characters who are so inept that they can’t hit a croquet ball, or run through the woods without tripping, or chop down a tree without the tree’s landing on a wedding tent may be the most infuriating way of all. Noah Baumbach’s new movie, “Margot at the Wedding,” is about a family that can’t do anything right. Margot (Nicole Kidman), a novelist with a disconcerting habit of sticking verbal knives into people, shows up at the house of her unhappy sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is about to marry an out-of-work artist and rocker, Malcolm (Jack Black). Misery, confusion, and much stumbling about ensue. The sisters go at each other furiously; Malcolm hates himself and throws wailing fits; Margot bombards her son with confidences that he should not be hearing. Baumbach, who made the heartbreaking “The Squid and the Whale,” is trying for a mood of Bergmanesque candor and laceration. The movie is even set on a Bergmanesque island—leafless and cold. There is nothing inviting or pleasurable here. If a director is throwing a house party, and has his most spiteful, loudmouthed, and inappropriate friends over, some of us may want to leave.

Pauline, a lifelong screwup, resents Margot’s habit of dropping incidents from the family’s life into her fictions. Baumbach was known to have drawn on his parents’ divorce for “The Squid and the Whale,” so there may be some sort of unburdening going on here. But there’s no way of telling whether Margot is a good writer or a bad one, or whether she has made creative use of her family or merely exploited it; Pauline’s complaint, like many others, just sits there, like dishes left unwashed after dinner. The characters observe no boundaries, and neither does the movie—Baumbach hasn’t worked out the struggle between speaking and withholding, as Bergman did. People simply blurt out scathing remarks, so there’s little power in the revelations and betrayals. “Margot” is sensually as well as dramatically impoverished. Couldn’t the bedraggled couple at least have had the wedding in spring or summer, when there’s a little color to look at? The dun-shaded chromatic scheme seems part of the general haplessness; it’s as if even nature were a flop. ♦

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